Rafaela Cavalcanti de Alcântara

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Education

During her Bachelor’s Degree studies in Law at the Federal University of Pernambuco (2008-2013, Brazil), she participated in initiatives like an academic project focused on popular education for human rights inspired by Paulo Freire’s thinking (“NAJUP Direito nas Ruas”), which comprised working together with people affected by major events in Brazil.

After graduating in Law, she started her Master’s Degree in Legal Sciences, with a concentration in Human Rights, at the Federal University of Paraíba (2014-2016, Brazil), supported by a scholarship granted by Brazil’s Federal Government. For her Master’s dissertation, she conducted an ethnographic-inspired study with a group of inhabitants subjected to a forced eviction in Recife, Brazil. The theoretical framework of her dissertation was mainly based on Historical Materialism and, at that time, she was a member of a research group on Marxism, Law, and Social Struggles (GPLutas/UFPB), which was focused on György Lukács’s The Ontology of Social Being back then.

Over the years after receiving her Master’s Degree, she took some academic courses independently while serving for Human Rights organizations - those classes encompassed Urban Studies and Social Movements, in addition to Gender, Technology, and Surveillance. In parallel, she received additional training in Personal Data Protection, Internet Governance, Artificial Intelligence regulation, and Human Rights Law.

She is currently a PhD student in the Science and Technology Studies program at the University of Vienna (2023-present, Austria), developing a dissertation on how urban data management enacts different body-territories and their exercise of the right to the city.

Experience

In her undergraduate years, Rafaela was a legal intern at a law firm and at the Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s Office, dealing with Constitutional, Tax, Administrative, and Environmental Law. During her Master’s studies, she was an assistant to the “General Sociology and Sociology of Law” Professor at the Federal University of Paraíba.

After her Master’s, she worked for the Brazilian Office of a Latin-American NGO, TECHO Latam, supporting legal empowerment initiatives in favelas. Later, she joined Article 19 Brazil and South America, where she worked as Assistant to the Acting Executive Director, Digital Rights Assistant, and Digital Rights Officer. In this context, she worked in the intersections between Information and Communications Technologies and Freedom of Expression for around three years, covering themes such as privacy, personal data protection, biometric surveillance, community networks, digital gaps in access to connectivity, disinformation about elections, and regulation of digital platforms.

Her previous working experiences also included collaborating on tasks like advocacy activities with local and national authorities in Brazil; workshops carried out with different constituencies, approaching themes from legal empowerment to digital rights; engagement with networks of social movements and other NGOs; strategic litigation initiatives for digital rights in Brazil and other South American countries; organization of independent sessions in national and international fora, such as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and RightsCon; research and draft of reports, technical notes, guides, and policy briefs, with a particular focus on International Human Rights Law (mainly United Nations and Inter-American Human Rights System standards and norms).

As part of the Auto-Welf project team at ITA, she dedicates herself to understanding the connections between welfare, data analysis, and the use of algorithms in the public sector - especially regarding urban management and social security. For this purpose, she has been conducting ethnographic research in Portugal.

Rafaela is also a registered lawyer in Brazil.

Projects

Publications